Surf N Salsa — Restaurant in Oʻahu

Where to begin with this review? I suppose I'll start by saying that I appreciate what Jhon(?) and company (family) are attempting here - yes, the prices are a bit elevated, but they're locally sourcing their ingredients, providing biodegradable containers, etc. I'm not salty about the prices.

What I am salty about is the wait time. My SO and I waited nearly an hour for an order of carne asada fries and two fish street tacos. An hour. For what realistically amounts to a single meal. Yes, there is a sign posted with the cashier which says diners can expect to wait ~25 mins, but it would have been ideal if the cashier herself had given us some additional context. You see, the setup here is with seating behind the food truck, which makes it difficult for someone to properly ascertain what, if any, queue might exist. My SO and I thought we were in luck to find such a short line - only two families ahead of us! - until after we'd placed our order and walked around back to discover four other groups of diners awaiting their own meals. Had we known there were that many people ahead of us, we would have chosen to eat somewhere else as we were on a bit of a schedule to catch the sunset. As we discovered, we actually could have ordered somewhere else and had worked our way through at least half that order in the amount of time it took to get our fries and tacos - go figure.

Now, the food itself. Surf N Salsa prides itself on making each order fresh from scratch; however, I find it suspect to think that our fish tacos and carne asada fries came up at the exact same time. It certainly neither appeared nor tasted that way. The fish tacos were merely okay. Nothing extraordinary, and just about as ordinary as you can get. The carne asada fries were a let down. Now, this may simply be due to the fact that I recently had a truly delicious plate of carne asada fries in San Antonio, TX back in November, but I don't think so. The carne lacked any real depth of flavor, and the fries ranged from crispy (which I like) to soggy (which I don't) with far too much regularity. I've sampled Mexican food in varied locations throughout my travels, and the variety being served up at Surf N Salsa is uninspired and derivative. Hell, my SO and I had excellent burritos in Fes of all places.

Okay, salsa. Our food came with two salsas, and one had considerably more bite than the other. I've read previous reviews in which the owner (Jhon?) absolves himself of responsibility for warning people about the Scoville units by citing different people having different tolerances. Yeah, that's a paper thin (and frankly, silly) position. No one is harmed or inconvenienced by Surf N Salsa alerting people to the potential for their salsas to cause them discomfort. People (my SO) are certainly negatively affected by having NOT been warned.

Overall, Surf N Salsa was a massive disappointment. Perhaps our visit simply occurred during an off day for them? Regardless, I am disinclined to give them a second chance at a...

This place serves below-par Mexican food. The hype must have gotten to their heads because they used to be decent, but now it feels like they only care about pulling people in, not serving quality food. My husband ordered a chicken quesadilla, and when it came out, there was no chicken in it. I went to the front desk to let them know, and instead of admitting the mistake, they argued and insisted it was made correctly. To make things worse, they didn’t offer to fix it. Instead, they said they could give me a cup of chicken—for an extra charge. Paying additional for chicken was never the issue. If they had simply said, “OK, we can fix that. You’ll just need to pay for the chicken, and we’ll remake it for you,” I would’ve had no problem. But that wasn’t even offered. Instead, they handed me a joke of a solution—a cold quesadilla with a cup of chicken on the side. When I refused, the lady at the counter was rude and uncooperative. I ended up requesting a refund. I would’ve had no problem paying extra if they had just remade the quesadilla properly, but instead they doubled down and treated us poorly. Terrible customer service and disappointing food—I won’t be coming back.

Response to owner: This incident occurred about a month ago, following our shark cage adventure in the north shore. Every time we are on the north shore, we get Surf and Salsa because our friends really like it. We loved going there until this incident occurred, leaving us with a very unpleasant experience. Like you said, the customer is never wrong. My husband always orders chicken quesadillas, so for your staff to say" I took his order and he told me the cheese quesadilla was very add. Exceptionally, since my husband never orders anything different, his order stays consistent. It could have been a misunderstanding, which happens, but we were hungry and wanted to eat what we ordered. That being said, the fact that the solution was to show that whoever was working or in charge that day did not care about the customers and only cared about making money showed us a lot. I understand that the cheese quesadilla would have gone to waste, and you have lost a small profit that day. But you have gained a loyal customer who brings me business that's worth far more than a wasted...

I’m sad to say we had an absolute horrible experience tonight. We brought our family to Surf N Salsa for dinner on 11/19/24. We ordered Taco Tuesday tacos for 4 adults and three hard shell ground beef tacos with only cheese and lettuce for our three children, empanadas, and agua frescas. We spent over $100.

While waiting for our food to come out, I watched a server spray out a spill from the floor of a kitchen cooler with the dish washer sprayer and all the dirty water was splashing up into the opened container of guacamole. They continued serving all their customers with this guacamole.

Not only did the food take much longer than we were told, but it came out made wrong. The tacos we ordered for our kids came out with tomatoes and sour cream drizzled all over them - this was a no go for my picky kids. My husband waited in line to let them know they were made incorrectly. After about 10 minutes they came out and grabbed the taco box off the table and opened it. She asked where the 1.5 tacos went and I explained that while my husband was up reordering the tacos, I had taken two tacos out to try to get our kids to eat them since they were hungry. They refused, so I ate half of one and my parents split the other. We didn’t want the food to go to waste and knew that once it was served and touched by us it should not be brought back to the kitchen! They could still see that they were made incorrectly from the 1.5 tacos that were still in the box. She then took the taco box into the kitchen and came back out and said they would replace ONE taco. I told her that was not acceptable and she told me that we could speak to the manager. After about 15 minutes and no manager, the server came back out with three new tacos made correctly. She didn’t say a word, set the box down, and aggressively snatched the old taco box from the table and brought it back to the kitchen.

The server was incredibly rude and ruined our experience. What could have been a simple fix, was made into a huge deal. This was incredibly poor...